Robert Kirkman Discusses The Walking Dead Video Games

John Gaudiosi is co-founder of GameHub Content Network and Editor-In-Chief of GamerHub.tv. He's covered the video game industry for 20 years for outlets like Reuters, The Hollywood Reporter, Forbes, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, Geek Magazine, NVISION and Tegrazone.

 Published December 31, 2012 10:30 AM

The creator of The Walking Dead gets his game on in this series of video interviews.

Robert Kirkman is the creator/writer of The Walking Dead groundbreaking best-selling comic books and graphic novels, and Executive Producer/Writer of AMC’s hit television show The Walking Dead, the top-rated basic cable drama, ever. Since 2000, Kirkman has helped to define comics for this decade. Before The Walking Dead was a pop culture sensation, it was already a successful comic book and just one of many comic titles that Kirkman has created and written for publisher Image Comics and his Skybound imprint over the past ten years.

Robert Kirkman’s impact as a writer, a creator, an innovator and an evangelist for creator’s rights (Google "Kirkman manifesto" if you want proof on that last one), has lead him to win the Eisner Award, the Inkpot Award, the Saturn Awards first-ever Innovator Award, and Spike TV's Game Changer Award, to name but a few. The Walking Dead Issue 100 was celebrated at San Diego Comic-Con with special events from a Zombie Survival Machine designed by Kirkman and realized by Hyundai to the popular The Walking Dead Escape obstacle course and most importantly, the issue became the best-selling initial order of any comic book in this century. We can hardly wait for the 100th issue of Invincible this January.

It all started when he was a boy, hopelessly obsessed with comics, action figures, movies and drawing. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, Robert’s father owned a sheet metal fabrication business and his wife was a housekeeper.

Robert’s imagination was stoked by cartoons, movies and comics, and playing in the wooded areas filled with bike trails near his home. "My childhood was a lot like Goonies," he recalls. "I'd go down the street to K-mart to buy my action figures, and I watched a lot of cartoons, like GI Joe and Transformers." Many of his earliest memories involve various pop culture icons: One Christmas, he asked for an Optimus Prime action figure and got Optimus Prime slippers instead. He remembers wearing out VHS copies of Return of the Jedi ("…years before I saw the other two Star Wars films") and Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness ("I watched it every night before I went to bed for an entire year"), and is happy to note that he never enjoyed sports and wasn’t a particularly good student, preferring to spend much of his time reading and collecting comic books. And drawing.

"I started drawing when I was pretty young,” he explains. "At first, it was lots of monsters, demons and scary stuff, because my mom was Pentecostal for a time." That led to some trouble in school when his fourth grade art teacher didn't appreciate his artistic choices, but in hindsight, he was really just preparing for his future career.